29 Years Later, Starship Troopers Gets An Immersive Resurrection
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While Robert Heinlein’s original 1959 novel is a wildly influential (and wildly controversial) foundational text for contemporary science fiction, it’s impossible to think of Starship Troopers and not think about Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 satirical classic. Even though it was a commercial disappointment and was misrepresented at the time as endorsing the very fascism it was meant to be critiquing, that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a beloved cult classic and one of the director’s most urgent and prescient films, rivaled only by the original Robocop. The movie was responsible for two live-action sequels, two animated films, and a host of video games, both inspired by the series and directly set in the universe, including the upcoming retro-shooter Starship Troopers: Ultimate Bug War.
In an interview with Inverse, Anthony O’Neil and Jack Chapman — the producer and level designer, respectively — discussed what it was like trying to make a game that fit within the legacy of Starship Troopers, and making something that honored the world crafted by the cinematic depiction. “I’ve always been a massive fan of Starship Troopers,” O’Neil explains. “It was one of those films that I was definitely too young to watch, but I took gleeful joy in going to my friend’s house with more relaxed parents and watching it without my parents’ permission. It’s always had a bit of a soft spot in my heart.”
A favorite film of teenage boys who don’t fully understand it until years later.
It’s a sentiment that Chapman echoes: “It was actually one of the first DVDs I ever had.” The appreciation for the series extends throughout Auroch Digital’s development team, whose previous game, Boltgun was set in the world of Warhammer 40K, and like Ultimate Bug War, was worked on by people who already had an attachment to the IP. “There tends to be a fairly small demographic of people who love Warhammer and love Starship Troopers as well,” says O’Neil.
Their love translates into a game that fits like a puzzle piece right into the world of Starship Troopers, specifically the cinematic canon and most directly from the first film. “I think it was very clear from the start that the most recognizable aspect of Starship Troopers is the first film,” O’Neil tells Inverse. “Our focus was on using the first film as our primary reference, and basically everything we’ve built has been taken from that.”
The developers built upon locations only briefly seen in the film, like Buenos Aires.
While using Verhoeven’s 1997 original as the foundation, Auroch also took inspiration from the sequels as well. “At the start of the project, one of the first things our lead designer did was watch through all three of the cinematic films and just point down every little thing we could possibly take,” O’Neil continues.
While things like the Warrior Bugs and the Morita Rifle are iconic images from the first movie that appear in-game, one of the big inclusions from the sequels is the mech suits, a huge part of Heinlein’s novel that didn’t appear until the later film installments. “Obviously, we steer clear from the books, but when they introduced the heavy mech suit from the original source material, that was a big thing,” says Chapman. “That was a really good challenge for the team, to present something that didn’t appear in the film, but we made something that, if you squint, definitely would belong in the film somewhere.”
Another challenge for the team was establishing where in the timeline the game would take place, with O’Neil explaining that eventually they decided to set it concurrently with the original film. The game’s lead, Sammy, is “doing her training around the same time Rico is. They both go to Klendathu and experience the Klendathu drop. And then whilst Rico is off in his healing tank, Sammy’s off having her experience of Zegema Beach.”
All of this is conveyed through the same FMV-style propaganda vignettes as the original film, which include Rico’s original actor, Casper Van Dien, an inclusion that required accounting for his age. “We had to say, okay, we’re going to set the FMVs several years after, and it’s going to be them looking back at their experiences during that first Bug War.”
Ultimate Bug War goes to painstaking lengths to recreate a few of Verhoeven’s iconic setpieces.
While the team at Auroch made sure to create a game that was aesthetically recognizable and firmly rooted in the worldbuilding of the film, they also made sure to replicate another crucial aspect of its longevity: Verhoeven’s satire of jingoism and military authoritarianism. In O’Neil’s words, “if the original film was created by the Federation as a recruitment tool, then our game was also going to be made by the Federation as a recruitment tool.”
That metatextual framing was important, and so was preserving the self-seriousness that makes the satire so effective. “The way we did it is saying, no, no, everything is completely straight. Our main character absolutely believes everything she’s doing is correct and that everything is being done the right way. But when you take a step back and realize, oh wait, no, I just threw a nuke at my own team and blew them up and nothing happens, for us, that’s when the satire comes in.”
